Adventures in snack time

For a variety of reasons, I’ve abandoned the concept of meals this past month and have gone into full-on snack mode. The only meal I eat with any regularity these days is breakfast. (Full disclosure: I was not a breakfast eater before I started breastfeeding. It feels weird to eat food first thing in the morning, but I don’t make milk without it.) I then proceed to snack every few hours until dinner time. Dinner is more likely to be cheese and crackers (or ice cream) than an actual meal. I can’t remember the last time I used a plate.

I’m all for cutting myself some slack, but sometimes you have to step up and say “Self, eat a vegetable.” Enter carrot butter.

What, now? you ask. I said the same thing when I first saw the recipe. But then I got to thinking about it, and it sounded…kind of good. I like carrots. I like macadamia nuts. I can deal with maple syrup. And I could use a good alternative to vanilla latte Pop-Tarts (a recent snack obsession that, tbh, I’m already growing tired of). I thought I might give carrot butter a try.

So I bought a bag of carrots, chopped ’em up, and roasted them to mush between editing projects the other morning. Oven-roasted carrots are, it turns out, what Whole Foods smells like. A weird, but not entirely unpleasant, smell.

I let ’em cool while I knocked out another project, then took a break to puree some macadamias. I went through a homemade peanut butter jag a few years back (which is why I have a Cuisinart), so I am no stranger to making nut butter. I couldn’t find any raw macadamias at Target (and wasn’t making any other stops because Kai is not the best shopper these days), so I went with roasted salted nuts and thus skipped the additional salt. Otherwise, I followed the recipe just as it is listed.

It is decadent.

Carrots. Decadent.

Creamy and rich, slightly sweet. I might even talk Kai into eating this stuff. (Anya has already decided it’s awful.)

I’m looking forward to snack time now. And I’m on a mission to find more recipes like this.